Thirteen years after Ben Folds Fivecalled it quits the trio is back with a new album and a tour that brings the band to Southern California this month. That’s a long break, admits Folds, the singer and pianist whose name the band features. Long enough it seemed a good time to reunite but also long enough that the reasons for splitting up in the first place have faded.

“Well, I was itching to do things my way for one,” Folds says when asked why the band, much loved by its fans but never a huge commercial success, broke up. “Which I think was healthy. I wanted to make records that didn’t all sound one way. And I remember basic dysfunction creeping into the entire organization.

“But it was basically because I think we were really tired,” he says, referring to bass guitarist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee as well as himself. “We were really, really worked. I know a lot of people could hear or read that and think, ‘Oh, I’m an accountant, I’m overworked too, I’d like to quit.’ But I didn’t quit music I just changed up the way it was done. It is a fun business, and if you’re not having fun anymore I don’t see how anyone else is going to have that.

Now, though, with the new record, “The Sound Of The Life Of The Mind,” and the naturalness with which he, Sledge and Jessee started to make music again, that sense of joy is back again, Folds says. In a way, the new album, with the band’s trademark sense of melody and lyrics that are both wistful and funny, fits neatly with the albums Ben Folds Five released during the ’90s – and might have kept making if burnout hadn’t taken its toll.

“Now that we’re back together, this sounds like more of the record that we would have made the next year,” he says. “However, the record that we were going to make was going to be flat.”

During most of the decade that followed Ben Folds Five’s split in 2000, Folds released solo albums, produced albums for artists such as actor William Shatner and former Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer, and collaborated with people including “High Fidelity” author Nick Hornby.

“I feel like I’ve done things that I’ve wanted to do,” he says. “I’ve played with orchestras all over the world. I’ve collaborated with people I really respected. It got it out of my system. It was like my lost weekend.”

Then, a few years ago, Folds says he came to feel comfortable with the idea of working with Jessee and Sledge again. “I’m no longer in this place where I’m having bad dreams about it,” he says. “And then once I opened my mind to it the opportunities came along to do things with Robert and Darren.”

In 2008 they reunited for a one-off show, playing their 1999 album, “The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner,” in its entirety for an audience in their home state of North Carolina. Three years later, Folds invited his former band mates to record a few new songs for a best-off collection, and that time together in the studio led to where the group ended up today, he says.

“We did the stuff for my retrospective record and we didn’t work most of the time on the songs that ended up on that record, we ended up working on random songs that sort of ended up being on the new (Ben Folds Five) record,” he says. “They just seemed a little too futuristic for the retrospective.

“I think we were very inspired when we came out of there. We came out of there and I had this long CD with maybe 20 different fragments of songs.”

His songwriting process remains the same no matter what project he’s working. “I just do what I feel,” Folds says. “And I don’t really make a decision that I’m going make this kind of album or that kind of album. I think each album, as a result, shows where I am at the moment, whether I’m working with Nick Hornby or the band.”

But the recording and performance of the songs feels somehow different with Sledge and Jessee, he says, partly because of their longtime friendship, partly because of the equality that working as a true band inspires.

“If I hire a band, I’m not an ego freak or anything and I don’t expect anything other than respect,” Folds says. “But these guys are working for me, I get it. But I think that’s different, the editorial process, and it’s unspoken. I can see Robert shuffling his feet or Darren looking bored and I know something’s not working.”

The story of the once-beloved band reuniting years later is an old one in rock ’n’ roll and one that can come with built-in anxieties: Will fans see the reunion as sincere or an attempt to cash in on nostalgia? Will they embrace the new album or dismiss it as not measuring up to the classics? Folds says he and Sledge and Jessee thought about those things briefly and then decided not to worry about how they’ll be received or perceived this time around.

“I think one, we’re just not that precious about it,” he says. “I think back in the day we might have been more precious about feeling misunderstood. We’re not standing on stage or in the press saying, ‘This is not a nostalgia record.’ If that’s what somebody wants to do, that’s just fine.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments, we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law, regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.

If you see comments that you find offensive, please use the “Flag as Inappropriate” feature by hovering over the right side of the post, and pulling down on the arrow that appears. Or, contact our editors by emailing moderator@scng.com.